Don’t Call Them ‘Mocktails’

I’m always thrilled when a certain former drinking buddy comes to see me at the bar. He stopped drinking alcohol years ago, but he’s as fun to be around as he was when we sat side by side at a corner bar in TriBeCa many nights in the ’90s — probably more so.

Quitting drinking, whether it’s for a month (as many are tempted to do this time of year) or forever, shouldn’t have to mean forgoing all the other, and arguably deeper, pleasures of bar culture: community and conversation. Of course it’s easier — and maybe economically sounder — to drink at home, but we go to bars because other people are there, and the fellowship we find with them is, for many of us, more important than the pints and shots.

I want my friend to be as happy and relaxed at the bar as any other customer, and he deserves something better than a cranberry and seltzer. Given the limited resources at my small, neighborhood pub, a virgin bloody mary usually does the trick — and mixed with a good nonalcoholic beer, it makes an excellent base for a virgin michelada, too.

Cocktail and restaurant bars are also making a greater effort to make nondrinkers feel welcome and well looked after. Some have dedicated nonalcoholic drink menus. On the list at Boston’s Bar Mezzana is a festive number called the Orchid Thief, fragrant with orange and tinged with vanilla, fizzed up with club soda and served in a flute — a celebratory glassful of booze-free bubbly. Abigail Gullo at Compère Lapin in New Orleans gladly accommodates nondrinkers with a cooler composed of fresh blackberries, citrus juices and orgeat, an almondy syrup that hints at the flavor of amaretto.

Another creative bartender, the Los Angeles-based Gabriella Mlynarczyk, has deliberately developed recipes that are delicious and satisfying with or without alcohol. One is the Mumbai Mule, for which she concocts a spicy syrup of ginger, turmeric, coriander, cumin, paprika, cayenne and honey. She then mixes it with coconut milk, tops it off with ginger beer and garnishes it with fresh curry leaves.

Part of the appeal of sitting at a bar with a cocktail is that it’s an opportunity to sip something special, unusual and lovely to behold. The three options featured here succeed in all these criteria. But let’s not call them mocktails — they’re not mocking anything. They stand on their own flavorful merits.

In bartending circles, there has always been discussion about the pressure to drink and the toll it can take. It’s an important conversation, and my sense is that in recent years it has become more open and more honest. Good drink will always be part of my life, but my constitution isn’t what it was when I drank most every night at that corner bar in TriBeCa. A glass of Champagne on New Year’s Eve still suits me. A gin fizz the following afternoon, sure. But on Jan. 2, make me a Mumbai Mule — and hold the vodka, please.